Turns out that everybody else got the same Email you did. And they are reacting the same way you did. "Ranting Profs."
POOR MAN
Pity poor Mr. Okrent. Here he takes the job as first "Public Editor" at the New York Times, a job he knows will not be easy. Facing the first controversy of his tenure, he thinks (no doubt) he's appropriately split the baby in half with Solomonic precision, both admitting the Baghdad bureau "dropped the ball" while simultaneously defending them by noting they are working under difficult circumstances (true) and that the Iraqi demonstrators didn't adequately advertise their demonstration in advance (please.)
A bridge too far, as we say. If he had just stopped with "life can be difficult and work terribly complicated" I think everyone would have chalked this one up to a nice first go out of the gate, been pleased he'd conceded to a mistake, understood he had to also defend his people, and even conceded back that life in a war zone in fact isn't easy. But by mentioning that lack of advance warning all he did was light off a second firestorm.
Everyone in the blogosphere who was upset the first time around, it seems, is upset all over again. After all, people are pointing out, if we knew, why didn't they know? It's being taken as primae facie evidence that the Timesmen and women aren't reading the Iraqi bloggers, which is in turn being taken as in and of itself a sin, the Iraqis being represented as the most accessible representation of the authentic voice of the new Iraq. (Frankly I still the think the bigger problem with the argument is the simultaneous argument that "after all, we published a picture." If the problem is they didn't have enough warning to get their people in place, then how come the photographer was there?)
Now alert reader Michael F. Fox points out another problem with this argument. How much advance warning is the Times getting from the pro-Saddam marchers, the al-Sadr supporters who march, the marchers who took to the streets after the moderate cleric was murdered in Najaf? Is it really the Times' argument that they can only get it together to cover events if they have enough advance warning? Obviously that isn't true when the news is bad. So we're right back to news judgement again, aren't we?
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